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Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled

theguardian.com

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Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled

#31

Post by sveme »

eddtests wrote: post #28

Honestly the description of this place sounds like what I’ve found Sweden to be, since moving here from Palo Alto last month. I am walking distance from everything I need, I am 10 minutes from a huge park with a large body of water, I walk to work, and if I need to detach I can take a boat to a summer house that’s off the grid.

The renders look like any Italian, French or Spanish small town. The concept as well.

Funny enough, there is a similar city in John Brunner‘s Sheep looking up, I believe. Established in the Bay Area as a utopian place after California became a postapocalyptic nightmare following a giant earthquake.

Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled

#33

Post by chopsuey5540 »

krisoft wrote: post #26
bee_rider wrote: post #20

> The group only recently started interacting with local officials and residents, according to media reports, and had sued landowners who sold their land over what it deemed an “illegal price-fixing conspiracy”. > “To date, our company has been quiet about our activities. This has, understandably, created interest, concern, and speculation. Now that we’re no longer limited by confidentiality, we are eager to begin a…

Building a city makes the land more valuable. If you tell people that you plan to invest a ton of money into the area they will include that information in their calculations when you are trying to buy their land. Some will then only sell their land for skyhigh prices, and some won’t sell at all in the hopes that they can sell it for even more once the city has been built around them. This can strangle the project in…

Yes indeed, they are being deceptive to the local community to try to rip them off.

Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled

#34

Post by WeylandYutani »

krisoft wrote: post #26
bee_rider wrote: post #20

> The group only recently started interacting with local officials and residents, according to media reports, and had sued landowners who sold their land over what it deemed an “illegal price-fixing conspiracy”. > “To date, our company has been quiet about our activities. This has, understandably, created interest, concern, and speculation. Now that we’re no longer limited by confidentiality, we are eager to begin a…

Building a city makes the land more valuable. If you tell people that you plan to invest a ton of money into the area they will include that information in their calculations when you are trying to buy their land. Some will then only sell their land for skyhigh prices, and some won’t sell at all in the hopes that they can sell it for even more once the city has been built around them. This can strangle the project in…

Gentrification for me but not for thee.

Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled

#35

Post by dd36 »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #27
waihtis wrote: post #8

The real challenge with this is keeping the type of people out who let SF devolve into the feverish nightmare politics it's currently running on. Any progressive quality-focused community will, over time, be infiltrated by people who's only contribution is subvertering and sabotaging what has been built, usually in the name of egalitarianism or some other veil.

I don't think you can run a "utopian project" in the USA at all. You're subject to US laws, and that means you're easy prey for litigants (even sufficiently motivated pro se litigants) -- and the civil justice system is an ordeal where there's only one outcome: You lose. In most cases, you lose lots of money in legal fees that you won't be able to claw back; in virtually all cases, you're slapped with injunctions and…

Land is developed all the time in the US.

Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled

#37

Post by xg15 »

> "To date, our company has been quiet about our activities. This has, understandably, created interest, concern, and speculation. Now that we’re no longer limited by confidentiality, we are eager to begin a conversation about the future of Solano county,” the group writes.

Or, in other words, now that we already own the land and can have the conversation on the terms we dictate.

Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled

#38

Post by someonehere »

One has to wonder if this is a plan for these “investors” to find a better way to keep affordable housing people on the other side of town vs their backyard. ie the current NIMBY fighting going on in Atherton with the forced affordable housing projects residents are griping about.

Most of the investors in the article are the ones pushing back against the affordable housing project in Atherton. Atherton is roughly five square miles so affordable housing in the middle of that has residents “worried” about what affordable housing brings to their oasis.

With this new town they’re proposing I can envision investors on one side, state mandated affordable housing on the opposite side, and city services, retail, etc., separating the two residential zones.

Re: Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled

#39

Post by forth_fool »

krisoft wrote: post #12
userbinator wrote: post #4

In practice, utopia usually becomes dystopia.

In practice or in fictional books? If in practice I’m sure you can share a handful of examples.

Some examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freetown_Christiania (ongoing experiment, I guess), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordl%C3%A2ndia, Soviet Union
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